Illinois open records law often a closed door

Cindy Sauer had a 7-year-old daughter with brain cancer, a Minooka home near two nuclear power plants and a hope that she might find clues linking the two buried in records of government regulators.

In 2002, without the benefit of lawyers to tailor her requests for public documents, Sauer embarked on an often-frustrating quest to learn as much as she could about spills of radioactive tritium from the Dresden and Braidwood plants owned by Exelon Nuclear.

Sauer never found an environmental cause for her daughter's illness. Still, her dogged push for records finally forced the state to acknowledge that huge and multiple radioactive spills had taken place and that Exelon had actively sought to thwart public discussion of them.

It should have taken Sauer a matter of weeks or months to pry loose the information from the state, but foot-dragging prolonged the process for four years.

"They used every stall tactic in the book, hoping we would just give up and go away," Sauer said. "They acted like they owned documents that belong to the public. But we found out that they knew a lot more than they were willing to tell us."

Sauer's saga is an all too familiar one in Illinois, where taxpayers are often confounded in efforts to gain access to information collected by local and state government—even though it is taxpayers who pay for those governments and the records they keep.

Illinois' 1984 open records law declares "that all persons are entitled to full and complete information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts and policies of those who represent them."

But the reality is something far less. Prying loose government records often becomes a maddening affair, with some agencies programmed to reject or ignore even the simplest requests while others concoct fanciful legal rationales as to why they need not comply.

When it comes to fights over open records, the focus is often on journalists and activists who frequently want to scour official documents in a hunt for clues to government ineptitude, waste and even corruption.

But more low-profile struggles go on every day. Parents with questions about school board practices, taxpayers with concerns about city zoning decisions, people with complaints about police brutality—all often find their search for answers in government records depends on the individual whim of a public official.

When one of the many broadly worded exemptions in the open records law is pulled out of a hat, most people just give up. Once a government flatly rejects a records request, the only remedy under current law is to sue, something so costly and time-consuming that few records hunters dare pursue it.

The result is a law designed as a safeguard against government secrecy has instead at times been used as an excuse to prevent the release of material that could uncover breaches of justice, fairness and public safety.

Spurred by the arrest, impeachment and ouster of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Illinois leaders are now talking up their commitment to making government more accountable. And a revision of the open records law is under discussion.

But up to this point, Sauer and many other citizens have learned how difficult it can be to gain a window on the operations of our public servants.

Time and time again, state agencies made Sauer jump through hoops to see documents and then gave her just some of what she requested. At one point, the director of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency chided Sauer for sending an appeal of a records rejection via fax instead of through the mail. Then he denied her appeal, again refusing to turn over the public records she wanted.

The good news is that Sauer's daughter, Sarah, survived her ordeal. Sauer eventually pried many key documents out of state agencies after teaming with a local park district where officials with deeper pockets and more expertise at their disposal had been asking similar questions but had also run into a stall.

It took until 2006, but the pressure finally forced officials to disclose that the Braidwood plant had spilled millions of gallons of tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen, on multiple occasions over a decade.

"If you are steadfast and keep hounding them, you will end up getting some documents that might help," said Sauer, whose family now lives in southern Indiana.

The current open records law, known formally as the noble-sounding Freedom of Information Act, in theory guarantees anyone access to most public records within a maximum of 14 working days after a request is filed.

But it also includes a raft of vaguely worded exemptions that give records custodians wide latitude to keep what they want under lock and key.

And many public employees at every level of government treat records as if they personally own them, and they often see any requests as an act of hostility, said lawyer Terry Pastika of the Citizen Advocacy Center, a non-profit agency in Elmhurst that works for government accountability.

"Their immediate response is either to ignore or automatically deny the request, hoping the person will go away," Pastika said. "That works. The system is so stacked against the individual who is trying to get information that they just give up and walk away from what they are legally entitled to."

Yvonne Mayer ran into that wall two years ago.

The Burr Ridge mother of four was in the audience at a January 2007 meeting of her local school board when she heard something she thought odd. One of the board members began questioning the conduct of his colleagues, saying they had improperly conducted board business in private by using personal e-mail accounts to discuss hiring a handwriting expert for $500 to peruse school documents.

That piqued Mayer's interest. She asked the district on multiple occasions to show records pertaining to the bill and those digital conversations to her but was often thwarted. The district, Hinsdale School District 181 in the western suburbs, refused to produce most of what Mayer asked for, arguing that it would be an invasion of privacy to force board members to turn over private e-mails even if they were used to discuss board business.

A district spokeswoman said no one tried to give Mayer the runaround. "Not all documents in a school district are public records," the spokeswoman said.

But Mayer, who is now running for a seat on the board because of the hassles she experienced, said the resistance to her requests was a silly waste that cost more than the handwriting expert himself.

"They put up wall after wall after wall," complained Mayer. "They're paying their lawyers to fight you. … The community has a right to know what's being decided and for what reasons."

Sarah Klaper, an instructor at DePaul University College of Law, said she does not believe government officials instinctively act out of malice in denying records.

Rather, officials often view a request for records as an "extra burden," she said. "When you balance that burden against a citizen's right to be informed and to have access to their government, it is a very small burden."

The Illinois Freedom of Information Act is a tool not just for the press but also for the public. Unfortunately, it serves neither constituency well. Instead, we in the media as well as those in the general public are forced to use a notoriously weak FOIA law to attempt to gain access to public...

The Republican-controlled Congress admitted defeat and sent legislation to President Barack Obama on Tuesday that funds the Department of Homeland Security without the immigration-related concessions they demanded for months.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before Congress on Tuesday and bluntly warned that an emerging nuclear agreement with Iran "paves Iran's path to the bomb." But President Barack Obama pushed back sternly, saying the U.S. would never sign such a deal and Netanyahu was offering...

Three more men have been arrested, and four others are being sought, in an investigation into Chicago-area "crash-and-grab" burglaries that netted the ring more than $2 million in merchandise, police said.

A Mundelein teenager was ordered Tuesday afternoon to remain in a juvenile detention facility at least until she's 20 years old for the murder of her 11-year-old sister, but will be released by the time she turns 21.